notice the same UTC timezone not GMT? I am logged in as root and this command is supposed to change your time zone. So why is it being ignored? I used it successfully once, but unfortunately i changed it to the wrong time zone and now it's stuck there. Can anyone help me?

oh, wait, forgot about /etc/conf.d/clock. I assume yours still lists UTC as the "CLOCK" setting...

# /etc/conf.d/clock

# Set CLOCK to "UTC" if your system clock is set to UTC (also known as
# Greenwich Mean Time). If your clock is set to the local time, then
# set CLOCK to "local". Note that if you dual boot with Windows, then
# you should set it to "local".

CLOCK="local"

# Select the proper timezone. For valid values, peek inside of the
# /usr/share/zoneinfo/ directory. For example, some common values are
# "America/New_York" or "EST5EDT" or "Europe/Berlin".

TIMEZONE="America/Vancouver"

# If you wish to pass any other arguments to hwclock during bootup,
# you may do so here.

CLOCK_OPTS=""

# If you want to set the Hardware Clock to the current System Time
# during shutdown, then say "yes" here.

softlink should work fine, but I think you have to change /etc/conf.d/clock's "CLOCK" directive to have it use localtime instead of defaulting to UTC all the time (which should be why his always shows UTC).